The winner of this year's global Dyson Award has been announced, and it's all gone rather sci-fi this time around. The Titan Arm exoskeleton thing has (effortlessly) picked up the big prize.

It's not all about loading cargo onto spaceships and punching aliens in the face. As well as enhancing the upper body strength of a generation for whom a physical workout is slamming a mouse on a table in anger, Titan Arm is also being pitched as a medical device. The exoskeleton is able to help train, monitor and strengthen arms, dishing out a level of automated physiotherapy to people who've lost some use in their arms due to accidents, back injuries or strokes.

The team plans to reinvest the £30,000 prize in investigating the options for electromyography, or the art of monitoring how nerve signals control muscles directly from the brain. It may, in some distant future, work as a fully automated replacement superman arm.